Groupon and Foursquare apps get Windows Phone 8 updates. Kind of.

The official Foursquare app for Windows Phone just got bumped to version 2.12 and includes “bug fixes, Thai and Indonesian languages added and application compatibility with Windows Phone 8”. All of that sounds good and people may be wondering what “compatibility with Windows Phone 8” actually means. Turns out, not much.

What we mean by that is there are no new functions here—no fast app resume, no doublewide tile, nothing for the Lockscreen, etc. It just means it should work properly on Windows Phone 8 and indeed, it does. We’re not knocking Foursquare as we’re sure they’ll release a WP8 version in the near future, but as of right now, this is quite minor.

Meanwhile, 4th&Mayor does support fast-app resume, meaning once it’s launched if you were to re-tap the app in the list or as a Tile, it resumes back where you left off instead of re-launching. That’s of course a Windows Phone 8 thing and it’s quite useful for obvious reasons.

Likewise, Groupon has also been bumped to a modest 3.0 for Windows Phone and this one does feature those WP8 new features like Lockscreen support (live wallpaper) and Wallet integration. In fact, it’s the same version we showed you the other day in our Windows Phone 8 apps preview. Of course current users can go and download that too, you just won’t get those super neat features.

yeah but I predict the Nokia one continues 7.x development while the public one is maintianed for WP8. Nokia seems to be playing a game of Noah's Ark by getting all of these popular apps in their collection before the non Nokia 7.x population gets abandoned in the flood.

- That's a lot of apps adding "WP8 compatibility". Why ? Isn't WP8 supposed to be backwards compatible with WP7 ? It seems like lots of apps won't work without a fix

- Why isn't fast-resume enabled by default ? For obvious reasons I think it should be the case since otherwise it means every single WP7 app needs to be updated to support this feature. Some apps may need to be re-launched, in which case it could be disabled by the app...

Daniel, What does WP8 compatibility mean?? And will we have two separate versions of a particular app??? Are you seeing the same count on the 8X as on WP7?? I read somewhere that people are not seeing all the apps. Are they yet to go live with the complete store in WP8?
sorry for so many questions!! :)

There is one bug fix (all that I can find) in foursquare 2.12. Shout text wasn't encoded properly so everything after a " would get cut off. That seems to be fixed. Explore, and numerous other bugs remain unfixed. It also doesn't have many of the new foursquare features. But, there's one bug fixed... in a year or more. ...Progress.